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Gustavmetzger: the Man Who Ensouled the World

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Gustavmetzger: the Man Who Ensouled the World Wales Journal of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 2020, Volume 2, 29-41 pp ISSN 2396-7285 (online) Edited by Simon K. Haslett Gustav Metzger: the man who ensouled the World. Jeremy Gluck 8, Oscar Chess House, Swansea SA1 4NG, UK. Summary - Crynodeb This paper critically examines the life and work of the refugee expatriate German Jewish artist Gustav Metzger (10 April 1926 – 1 March 2017), with an emphasis on how his formative experiences informed his unique body of conceptual, installation and performance art. The aim is to offer a critical reflection and analysis of the artist, corroborating the calibre and legacy of his work, and presenting new ways of understanding it. It will be argued that this unusual, important work, little covered by academia, is often underestimated in its significance and influence. The objective of this paper is to encourage the community of conceptual and other artists, and especially young British artists, to explore and be inspired by his life and work. Mae’r papur hwn yn archwilio ac yn ystyried yn feirniadol fywyd a gwaith y ffoadur alltud, yr artist Almaenig Iddewig Gustav Metzger (10 Ebrill 1926 – 1 Mawrth 2017), gyda phwyslais ar y modd y gwnaeth ei brofiadau ffurfiannol difrifol ddylanwadu ar ei gorff unigryw o gelf gysyniadol, osodiadol a pherfformiadol. Y nod yw adfyfyrio a dadansoddi’r artist yn feirniadol, gan gadarnhau safon a gwaddol ei arfer, a chyflwyno ffyrdd newydd o’i ddeall. Ac yntau’n ddyfodolwr a ofnai’r dyfodol, daeth ei waith yn gerydd i hunanfodlonrwydd a niwtraliaeth: i Metzger roedd yna rywbeth bob amser yn y fantol. Dadleuir bod arwyddocâd a dylanwad y gwaith anarferol, pwysig hwn, sydd heb gael fawr o sylw gan academyddion, wedi’i danbrisio, gan gynnwys ei arbrofion cynnar ym Mhrifysgol Abertawe. Archwilir a deellir cyfraniad hynod Metzger, a theori ac arfer celf Hunan-ddinistriol, yng nghyd-destun ei daith wedi’r Rhyfel fel ffoadur. Amcan y papur hwn yw annog y gymuned o artistiaid cysyniadol ac eraill, ac yn enwedig artistiaid ifanc o Brydain, i archwilio’i fywyd a’i waith a chael eu hysbrydoli ganddynt. Keywords: conceptual art, installation art, fluxus, autodestructive art, postmodernism Introduction This paper is an examination of and reflection upon the life and work of the refugee German Jewish artist Gustav Metzger (10 April 1926 – 1 March 2017). Throughout his life and since his death in 2017 academic research into Metzger’s life and practice has been scant (Grimes, 2017); the Finnish academic, Pontyus Kyander, a notable exception. Stated Kyander - curator of, collaborator with and essayist on the artist - “Metzger’s practice is founded in a dark vision of Man and History” (Kyander, 2006). Metzger’s “dark vision” reflects his uncommon transit (Kyander, 2006). In investigating his entanglement with his times, it is found that Metzger’s apparently marginal presence in modern art belies an influence and importance warranting continual review (Shanken, 2005). After lengthy duration in its exhibition, this year Tate Modern consigned one of Metzger’s signature works, Liquid Crystal Environment (O’Brien, 2009), to its archives. Tate Britain, with a body of his paintings in its collection, now exhibits none; it’s All Too Human show (February 28 to August 27, 2018), whilst giving Metzger contemporaries David Bomberg, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach prominence, excluded him, despite his relevance to that group of painters. Given Gustav Metzger’s story, this could be inevitable. A determined loner (O’Rorke, 1998), distancing himself as a matter of principle, he made a stand on the history that shaped him, fashioning from it art intended to destroy itself or by its maker be destroyed (Jones, 2009). For the practice of this founder of Auto-destruction is synonymous with possibly the greatest ‘performance’ of automated destruction of modern history - the Final Solution – and its infamous ‘installations’, the death camps. After the war, Metzger’s story broke like a tide from the cataclysm that unleashed it, becoming one of his own performances and installations. Metzger literally reaped the whirlwind, or rather harvested and reshaped it, creating a testament to a post-Holocaust, post- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License 2020 Wales Journal of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Volume 2 industrial, proto-technological world often as intangibly evanescent as the wind itself. Ephemerality, disposability – even of the human being – and types of futility are telegraphed by this work, yet despite its unalloyed starkness, its humanity and humility are equally present. Perhaps because Metzger made himself and his art hard to hold close, interest in his contribution to post- modern art fluctuates; the partial aim of this paper is to celebrate it. The overall lack of academic research means that most coverage tends to be favourable or neutral in its critical analysis. Coverage from online newspapers and journals constitute much of the detailed sources, as well as online videos where the artist expresses himself spontaneously. What little dissenting opinion there is administers a harsh but welcome bromide to otherwise benign, sometimes slavish praise. A substantial picture of the artist must be assembled piecemeal, leaving many gaps; the wide but often shallow coverage of a long, productive life necessitates in this paper an idiosyncratic cross-section of Metzger’s life and work, including features less remarked upon. In the wake of his death, for a complex artist who originated abstruse work dedicated to its own temperality, this may be appropriate. Metzger’s life spanned nearly a century, and he made use of all of it. Ever a consummate outsider (Jones, 2009), his visionary art reveals a will of deceptively tractile iron, bespeaking deliverance from the fate shared by many of his family at the hands of the Nazis (Brown, 2017). Art that militated against artifice and disingenuousness, in a sense becoming a cynosure of the human being to come as it would elect to imagine itself: benevolent and principled, with unclouded self-concept. Metzger’s importance may never be wholly validated (Renton, 2004) but his measure can be better understood. His story for me resoundingly plangent, this paper comes from my heart as well as mind. My generation of Post-Holocaust Jews materialised from its shadow and so, born a year before Metzger’s breakaway 1959 work, Cardboards, discussed in this paper, I find in Metzger a deeply affecting Muse and putative mentor. Discovering and deconstructing him, I rediscover and reconstruct myself, aware anew of how my own post-Holocaust experience shapes my practice, nature and life, bringing a recognition that my work, before and through my discovery of Metzger’s practice, is so resonant with it. Ameliorating diverse glimpses of his character suggests fascinating themes. Gripped by his catalytic creativity, I have come to love Metzger’s work. I owe him a great debt, which will no doubt increase. This piece of writing attempts instating repayment. Hotting Up, my first chapter, will examine Metzger’s formative years, the pivotal impact of the Holocaust upon him, his refugee journey to Great Britain, and his eventual entrance to the London artist community, leading to his decisive break with his mentor David Bomberg. Chapter Two, Fully Alive, deals with the genesis and legacy of Auto-destructive art for Metzger and his transition to Auto-creative art. In Chapter Three, Hate into Love, his manifestos trigger a scrutiny of his later years and his influence on contemporary art. Hotting Up New York Times reviewer Ken Johnson at the end of his report of Gustav Metzger’s debut solo show in the United States, the 2011 Historic Photographs installation at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, mused: Frankly, I am mystified. How does it happen that the international art world intelligentsia has rallied around such punishingly obvious, politically banal, morally bullying and aesthetically enervating work? Is the New Museum’s audience really as dim as this show implicitly assumes? Finally, I wonder, what purpose and whose interests are served by an exhibition that treats its viewers with such contempt? Is it a European thing to think that any art about the Holocaust must be important? (Johnson, 2011) At eighty-five Gustav Metzger had lost neither his maverick status nor power to exercise critics (Ivry, B. 2011); given his journey, Johnson’s question might seem insensitive but is apposite. Only in 1981 did Metzger begin to deal explicitly in his work with the Holocaust, with an exhibition of anti-Semitic laws at Bern’s Kunstmuseum (Watling, 2012). The Holocaust was central to the exhibition, and fully to his life and practice (Jones, 1998): from it came much that emerged from him as art. “I was twelve years old, when things were hotting up related to Jews...all of that is a constant inner world I live in” (Metzger, 2015, cited in Wilson, 2015). By his own admission, the Holocaust and its destruction of his family made the imprimatur upon him responsible for art that later would, with its apparent embrace of ruin, evoke “the politics of horror” (Yahav, 2014; Jones, 2009). Growing up in Nuremberg before the war, witnessing stormtroopers marching to crush his existence, escape from which would catalyse his destiny, and later when most of his family were killed by the Nazis, was internalised as a toxic, transformative cache which art one day safely unpacked (Brown, 2017). Seeing malign power glorified, he had to expunge its signature somehow. And, raised an Orthodox Jew, he 30 2020 Wales Journal of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Volume 2 reacted from a rejection of power rooted in ancient Judaism, which disdains power and instead glorifies renunciation of the material and surrender to the Divine (Metzger, 2009, cited in Jones, 2009).
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